coloured livery of the fall.[*] The heavens were clothed in
driving clouds, piled in vast masses one above the other, which whirled
violently in the gusts; opening, occasionally, to admit transient
glimpses of the bright and glorious sight of the heavens, dwelling in a
magnificence by far too grand and durable to be disturbed by the fitful
efforts of the lower world. Beneath, the wind swept across the wild and
naked prairies, with a violence that is seldom witnessed in any section
of the continent less open. It would have been easy to have imagined,
in the ages of fable, that the god of the winds had permitted his
subordinate agents to escape from their den, and that they now rioted,
in wantonness, across wastes, where neither tree, nor work of man, nor
mountain, nor obstacle of any sort, opposed itself to their gambols.

[*] The Americans call the autumn the "fall," from the fall of the
leaf.

Though nakedness might, as usual, be given as the pervading character of
the spot, whither it is now necessary to transfer the scene of the tale,
it was not entirely without the signs of human life. Amid the monotonous
rolling of the prairie, a single naked and ragged rock arose on the
margin of a little watercourse, which found its way, after winding a
vast distance through the plains, into one of the numerous tributaries
of the Father of Rivers. A swale of low land lay near the base of the
eminence; and as it was still fringed with a thicket of alders and
sumack, it bore the signs of having once nurtured a feeble growth of
wood. The trees themselves had been transferred, however, to the summit
and crags of the neighbouring rocks. On this elevation the signs of man,
to which the allusion just made applies, were to be found.

Seen from beneath, there were visible a breast-work of logs and stones,
intermingled in such a manner as to save all unnecessary labour, a
few low roofs made of bark and boughs of trees, an occasional barrier,
constructed like the defences on the summit, and placed on such points
of the acclivity as were easier of approach than the general face of the
eminence; and a little dwelling of cloth, perched on the apex of a small
pyramid, that shot up on one angle of the rock, the white covering of
which glimmered from a distance like a spot of snow, or, to make the
simile more suitable to the rest of the subject, like a spotless and
carefully guarded standard, which was to be protected by the dearest
blo